Annual Report Part II: Could PBL and Inquiry Based Learning fill the gaps?

Animoto compiled and produced by Kate Covintree, Upper School Librarian

I was taking a moment today, October 14, 2020, to appreciate the beautiful autumn day following a stormy Tuesday. The weather seemed analogous to our longing for an end to the COVID19 storm that has been challenging our social, emotional, and educational interactions for seven months. I had recently been reminded of Part 1 of our Annual Report: Starting at the Finish published on this blog in August summarizing our successes along with our personal and professional challenges in the spring of 2020.  The "report" highlighted our departmental work during remote learning.  We moved quickly to the digital realm for resources, teaching, and learning. In my reverie, I came upon an article about PBL, project-based learning, as the answer to the learning gaps created by the distance learning of the spring where equity and access played a crucial role in the quality and efficacy of the emergency remote learning experiences of many students. 

We have returned this fall to mostly in-person learning, with grade-level hybrid models and self-selecting distance learning for some students. Classroom and student interactions look different from last fall. Instead of encouraging close collaborative and inquiry-driven models of learning in flexible workspaces classroom environments with social distancing safety guidelines now look much more like the traditional classrooms found in The Wednesday Wars by Gary D Schmidt, set in 1967. We have found our own spaces compromised in terms of access and flexibility due to the social distancing that is an essential part of our healthy return to campus.

As we return to traditional-looking classrooms, have we also retreated from student-driven learning as part of the Inquiry and PBL goals of last fall? There are so many factors to consider here that to distill all of the challenges in this difficult time down to one over-simplification of a teaching and learning model is unfair and inaccurate. I've watched teachers adapt their classroom limitations to engage their students while employing every tool garnered from years of experience under challenging circumstances, which can include changes in the weather and shifting numbers of students learning remotely on any given day. They are to be commended, routinely, for the work they have done to make this substantive and meaningful for Wheeler and Hamilton students with the ever-present possibility of positive cases of COVID 19.

However, the reason I am writing this under our annual report heading is two-fold. Last fall the Librarians who were Miller Fellows for Teaching and Learning at the time were invited into curricular discussions and planning at every level and in every discipline. The drastic change in teaching and learning in a COVID19 world has sidelined some of these initiatives, but should it? In fact, wouldn't Inquiry and PBL, created as a modular student-paced learning experience be just what is needed to engage and encourage learning in different environments, both in-person and digital?

Spurred in part by the 2019 summer reading of Diving into Inquiry by Trevor MacKenzie faculty were challenged last school year to grow their curriculum in the Inquiry model based loosely on the John Dewey philosophy of "living as learning." Needless to say, inquiry fits very well with the research models we as librarians have encouraged as part of a robust curriculum for critical thinking and we were pleased and quite busy as teachers came to talk through ideas and find collaborators to help implement change. We were also asked to be resources for those veteran faculty members who were going through a revised evaluation process that encouraged Project and inquiry-based thinking and learning. 

Some of us worked closely with faculty to add an experiential component to their curriculum hoping to link disciplines such as science, history, and English in 7th grade by considering the Lowell Mills for their social impact through writing in the Lowell Offerings, the economic impact of cotton textile mills, as well as the science of water power using gears pulleys and more to build a robust manufacturing society in the Northeast. Tapping into Slater Mill and the Museum of Work and Culture these cross-disciplinary and "place-based" learning experiences were created to also help students see the value in material culture as part of the story and spark their interest in history both locally and regionally.

We in the libraries continued through February with Quahog Cup, Rooster Games, and Battle of the Books reading and promotions along with the tradition of the National Library week trivia contests. Revisions in the Upper School Tech Core fostered true collaboration with the Tech Facilitator and the Upper School Librarian creating a learning experience that provided an inquiry model of engaging topics and meaningful sharing for 9th grade students. 

Information Skills for 6th-grade developed projects that examined important literacies. Assessing information sources and looking at the use of media production techniques that convinced an audience that a fictional event was somehow made realistic helped the students explore "fake news," and finding reliable online sources. They learned that confirmation bias plays to our emotions, not our critical thinking brain. All of this excitement for developing opportunities that fostered a high level of engagement among students were impacted by the COVID19 lockdown and emergency remote learning in the spring. Teachers were challenged to compress the remainder of the curriculum into fewer classes, less face time with students, and the final quarter of the year.

Projects that had already begun had to find a digital mode to continue the student work. Digital ways to share final projects were devised and research projects not yet started that had in the past been part of the final quarter were modified or sidelined. So too it seemed that inquiry and project-based learning fell from the radar a bit in terms of new (or tried and true but not in the virtual realm.) PBL or IBL curriculum.

This summer there was a team of Virtual Teacher Leaders charged with creating an accessible repository of ideas and models for the return to remote teaching should that be necessary. I was the representative librarian on that team. As we researched best practices in preparation for when we might go fully remote again one theme came through and that was that PBL and Inquiry-Based Learning designed in a modular student-paced way could be the key to filling in the learning gaps in a hybrid or remote learning environment.

Our fall and winter semester of learning last year was full and busy in the libraries. We spent our retreat charting a course toward our Include Shared Foundation as we evaluated our collections through a diversity, equity, and inclusion lens. We were active and sought after collaborators in curricular change. As school year 20-21 has started, we find ourselves encountering new and unique challenges all of which look quite different from our previous fall.  

Materials management and safe access to the spaces and the collections have been a priority, along with the fact that unless we are scheduled to be a "special" or rotation we will be "pushing our way into classrooms" to  In some cases literally with carts and rolling bans and in other cases figuratively. In order to try and keep inquiry and its component parts of digital literacy, media literacy, and research.  We can help, talk to us, projects can make the dichotomy of your teaching life manageable and meaningful as well as addressing the conundrum of assessments and feedback. IBL and PBL are still here and so are we. Our spring was robust as we turned on a dime and were meaningful partners in the realm of digital teaching and learning. Consider us as you reclaim the level of student engagement that Inquiry can manifest in a digital world.